Field
The present disclosure relates generally to implementation and management of practices and procedures within an organization or across organizations. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to automated systems for implementing best practices.
Description of the Related Art
Organizations strive to improve their practices and procedures in order to remain competitive. Many organizations seek to employ “best practices” and standard operating procedures in various endeavors undertaken by members of the organization, both in providing services and products to customers and in internal operations.
Some firms maintain files with content relating to standard operating procedures and best practices. The information is typically stored in paper files, and, more recently, in electronic files or databases. Typical approaches to storing and retrieving content about standard operating procedures and best practices may have several shortcomings. These shortcomings can include:
1. The content may be scattered throughout voluminous documents and throughout the organization. Also, the content may be poorly organized and not kept current. As such, it can be difficult to find the content that is truly relevant to a person's situation and specific need.
2. Incentives are lacking to add content to the system.
3. The content that is added to the system may be one-dimensional documents and reports, rather than intelligently indexed content.
4. There is heavy reliance on the user to recognize a need for best practice information, and to take affirmative action to search for it.
5. The barriers to finding useful content work as a disincentive for future use.
6. There is no mechanism to indicate how useful the content the users found was.
Marketing organizations sometimes use simulation software to conduct market research. In some cases, simulation software can improve allocation of marketing resources of an organization or its customers. Marketing simulation software may, however, fail to provide the best marketing solutions to an organization. Among other things, typical simulation software may not implement the best practices known within an organization for carrying out a marketing campaign. Moreover, the simulation software may fail to provide mechanisms for improving marketing and research practices over time.